AI Copilot in plain English.

An AI copilot is an AI assistant built directly into an existing app or workflow — Microsoft 365 Copilot inside Word and Excel, GitHub Copilot inside your code editor, Salesforce Agentforce inside a CRM — rather than a separate chatbot you switch over to. The pitch is that a copilot already has context on what you're doing (the document you're editing, the code you're writing, the deal you're managing) without you having to explain it or copy-paste content back and forth. The category has become the dominant way large software companies ship AI in 2026: rather than compete head-on with ChatGPT or Claude as a destination, most enterprise software vendors have added an in-app copilot layered on top of one or more frontier models. Quality varies enormously by vendor — the best copilots feel like a genuine productivity boost; the weakest feel like a bolted-on chat window that adds a menu item nobody uses.